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Airlines

Beyond the Black Box: Fixing Aviation's Broken Communication Systems

Jason Clampet photo
Marisa Garcia

Photo Credit: File-This file photo from Tuesday May 3, 2011 by France's air accident investigation agency, the BEA, shows the flight data recorder from the 2009 Air France flight that went down in the mid-Atlantic. In June 2009, an Air France flight from Rio de Janeiro to Paris crashed during a bad storm over the Atlantic Ocean. The Airbus A330’s airspeed indicators were giving false readings.  AP Photo/BEA / Johann Peschal

Skift Take

Aviation has helped us rise above the clouds. Technology has helped us share information via the clouds. But a clouded judgement keeps aviation from finding technology up there.

With Malaysia flight MH730 missing, and no information yet available on what made it disappear from the skies, the world speculates over what might have happened and wonders how we could not know more. The fact-gathering delay in aviation is inconsistent with a modern society. The airspace is populated by aircraft which rely on communications and data management standards which a regulatory authority official we spoke to described as "dated." In his report "Moving Aviation Towards a 21st-century Communications System," [embedded below] Jacky Pouzed, Head of the Communications and Frequency Coordination Unit at EUROCONTROL, discusses a multi-pronged method to improve the exchange of information for the industry. The proposal is for advanced automated systems for critical flight information management. He writes: "as traffic has increased beyond expectations, [the current voice] form of communication has now reached operational limits in some of the more busy areas." He adds: "The aviation community has developed and started to implement digi

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